Where Defeat Is Not An Option

Economy

…And so, with every attempt to manipulate the (Chinese) market higher falling flat in the face of selling pressure from the hairdresser/ farmer/ banana vendor day trading crowd (which has now thrown in the towel on the whole “it’s easier than farm work” theory and now just wants to break even and head for the hills) the only thing left for China to do is “fix” the narrative.

In other words, when banning selling doesn’t work, the logical next step is to ban talking about selling…

…So apparently, Beijing will now prevent journalists from accidentally jawboning the market lower so that Party mouthpiece media outlets are free to jawbone the market higher.

Needless to say, we doubt if this hail Mary attempt to rescue the market will do anything at all to save China from its homemade equity disaster.

Indeed. I haven’t paid too much attention to the market slide in China because I just figured the Chinese government would order stocks to go higher – telling the money bags in China that they’d better buy or else, ya dig? But if China’s market has got a huge number of small traders who are now getting burned…well, you can shoot a dozen bankers who don’t cooperate: its a much more difficult prospect to shoot 100,000 small investors who are bailing out.

There is one thing I do know about markets – when average folks start borrowing money to invest in it because it will always go higher, then it is crash time. We’ll see how this plays out – but China has already lost $3 trillion in stock value since June…ain’t looking too pretty.

See? It’s not just me any more – Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) weighs in on how the GOP can leverage a bit of anti-corporatism for electoral victory:

…the fact is that many big businesses are unpopular with the public, aligned with the Democrats, and wide open for attack. And after eight years of the Obama administration’s naked cronyism and support of Wall Street even as the middle class has suffered, the opportunities are there.

One of the most appealing targets would be the tech industry’s wage-suppressing hiring habits. Not only have tech giants like Apple and Google engaged in what a federal court called an “overarching conspiracy” to prevent wage competition, but Silicon Valley firms also abuse H-1B visas to bring in immigrant competition at lower wages, a practice that’s now spreading to other industries. (In Los Angeles, Southern California Edison is firing workers and replacing them with immigrants now)…

Reynolds goes on to note how big corporations – especially big tech – are abusing the H1-B visa program to get rid of well-paid American workers and bring in low-paid foreigners, thus abusing both Americans and foreigners in the name of increased corporate profits. That is just one in a very long line of issues where Big Corporation is working against the United States. We on the GOP side have got to wrap our minds around the fact that big anything is bad. Once a concentration of power and wealth exceeds a certain size, it becomes baleful…and must be controlled carefully, lest is wreck everything. We understand this regarding things like the Department of Education, but we’ve failed to understand that General Motors is just like the Department of Education…an bureaucratic behemoth most interested in using raw, political power to preserve itself.

It is the free market we must defend – not those who are on top of the market and who are abusing their position. That the leaders of these corporations also largely support Democrats (or are at least de-facto liberals), just makes attacking them doubly advantageous for us. It becomes best of all when we realize that a lot of people who vote liberal (but who are not particularly liberal, themselves) can be moved to vote for us when we do this. Defending the worker against ruthless exploitation by Big Tech is just a splendid way to move the needle in our favor…let Democrats defend the H1-B visa program, we’ll defend the workers.

We have a grand opportunity to take the abysmal failure of the Obama years and use it to destroy liberalism as a political force forever. All we have to do is dare to take it.

Just more of that good, old global warming climate change climate disruption heading towards the midwest:

Following several weeks of economic data that has been, despite erroneous expectations of a Fed rate hike, one major disappointment after another including regional Fed reports, housing data, manufacturing surveys, construction spending, and durable goods data, the US economy is about to get the slowdown scapegoat it so desperately needs: according to Weather.com, following a brief overnight respite from cold temperatures, entering the first full week of January, both the Midwest and the East will see a plunge to the coldest temperatures of the season. This blast of cold temperatures will be different than the Arctic chill that ended 2014, which was mainly confined to the northern tier. This time the frigid air will push farther south and east.

Only thing I can figure is that Al Gore must be making a speaking tour through the area – but, as Zero Hedge notes, this is going to cause sighs of relief through our Economist and Banker classes…that it is cold in January will be used to explain away the poor 1st quarter GDP data we’re going to get in April (and, as usual, this exceptionally cold spell will be used to “prove” global warming…because if we weren’t warming, you see, we wouldn’t get weather that is unusually cold). The thing about our modern system is that it is so hopelessly corrupt that both global warming and fake-money economies can be kept going for quite a while…

Governor Bobby Jindal & Congressman Bill Flores have teamed up to deliver what I have waited for for a long time now. A responsible, common sense, aggressive economic strategy to lift Americans up, lessen our countries dependence on foreign oil, and solidify our economic prominence, which in turn strengthens our overall standing and influence in the world. Not too mention, this strategy could very well stave us off from bankruptcy and/or loss of our reserve currency status which would be devastating to all of us in this country and our way of life. Just as manufacturing was the economic platform that made America strong in the 1940’s and 1950’s, and much like the technological boom made the 1980’s and 1990’s thrive, energy is the next economic platform that will drive jobs and salaries and we have vast amounts for energy to tap into. The current economies malaise and standstill we find ourselves in is a direct result of Obama’s left wing ideology and pandering to the minority of environmental lobbyists. Obama has even forsaken one of the Democrats golden geese, the Unions, in his refusal to allow Americans to build the next energy economic platform and in turn he has suppressed job growth, wage growth, increased dependence on government hand outs, and has generally made life economically miserable for millions of American families. We can do so much better.

Access to affordable energy impacts every aspect of our nation and our families – it is the lifeblood of our economic security, and ultimately our national security. America’s energy resources are the envy of the world. Our nation’s combined resources of oil, natural gas, and coal exceed those of every other nation on Earth. And these energy resources, if fully maximized, could help create millions of high-quality American jobs. Nevertheless, over many years, Congresses, and administrations, have enacted a shortsighted patchwork of reactive laws, regulations, and executive orders only dealing with immediate energy issues. We can and must do better.

This strategy must be at the core of the GOP platform for 2016, and any candidate that does not fully embrace this strategy will not earn my vote. We can and must use our vast energy resources to strengthen our economic and national security while at the same time protecting our environment. North Dakota has led the way on this and you will only need to look at that state to see what the possibilities are — 3% unemployment and high wages even in the service industry. If we expand that opportunity out across large areas across this country, we can deliver prosperity to millions of Americans currently mired in the Obamaville of no hope and little change.

This strategy is a “no brainer” in my opinion. Please read the entire document and offer your opinion, and go to the website here for more information.

The U.S. jobs report, a key measure of how well the economy is doing, has gotten increasingly less accurate in the past 20 years. The fix for that problem could be in a surprising place: Twitter.

Those are the conclusions of two separate reports out this month. The first report, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that the unemployment number released by the government suffers from a problem faced by other pollsters: Lack of response. This problem dates back to a 1994 redesign of the survey when it went from paper-based to computer-based, although neither the researchers nor anyone else has been able to offer a reason for why the redesign has affected the numbers.

What the researchers found was that, for whatever reason, unemployed workers, who are surveyed multiple times are most likely to respond to the survey when they are first given it and ignore the survey later on…

This works out to an under count of the unemployed and/or an over count of people not in the labor force – the bottom line is that the official unemployment rate doesn’t really reflect the unemployment picture. This is something we’ve known for a while just by the labor force participation rate: if we are in a recovery, it should not be going down. The fact that it is down means that something is off – and calculations of unemployment based upon, say, a 2007 level of participation would still likely have the official rate in double digit territory. But now we see that aside from that, the basic survey is just flawed.

I’ve long had grave doubts about the whole methodology we use to judge the state of the economy. We aren’t quite as bizarre as Spain, which is apparently set to use transactions in, shall we say, ladies who work in a very specialized form of entertainment, as part of their GDP, but we’re close. To me, there is something absurd in counting government spending as part of GDP, let alone counting what a lonely man blows a hundred bucks on. Real economic strength should be judged by what we make, mine and grow.

If the economy is improving, we’ll see it in statistics of corn production, gasoline refined, tons of iron ore mined, and things like that. These things can’t lie and they can’t be fudged. Did we, or did we not, produce more steel in July of 2014 than in June of 2014? July of 2013? July of 2004? If the answer is “less” then that would be a bad indicator. It still might be partially explained by other factors (maybe we’re more efficient in our use of steel, for instance), but the bottom line is that if the production is up, then things are better than if production is down…because people don’t produce for customers that don’t exist. I want to know the measure of production for real goods that people use – I want to know what it is last month, the month before that, the year before that and ten years before that…this way I can see how things are going in both the short and long term; and no need to seasonally adjust: each July will be pretty much like all other Julys. Just tell me what was made, mined and grown – I’ll then see for myself if things are worse, better or just the same…and that will also inform me of what the employment picture is like. If we’re producing less steel, it is a cinch that we’ve got less steel workers, and so on.

We don’t need to know how many people are working in the legal industry – it produces no wealth. Don’t need to know how many people are working in the tourist industry – it also produces no wealth, once you understand that wealth is not a casino mogul in Vegas raking it in hand over fist, but a farmer in the midwest growing corn. The reality is that the entirety of our economy – all of that government and law firms and casinos, etc – is dependent upon the ability of the United States to make, mine and grow things. If we don’t make, mine and grow enough things, then the economy is doomed, no matter how much money the Fed prints to keep things going for years after the economy collapsed. So, let’s start counting what matters and see what our economy is actually like – it’ll tell us what we need to do.

If it is one thing the Democrats are very good at, and one thing that their legions of progressive sycophants depend on – it’s redundancy. The Democrats bleat on endlessly over contrived issues and the repetition thereof results in an allegiance amongst their base that rivals that of the most famous Tyrants. It’s at a level now that I have never seen before and the most recent Paul Krugman article is a great example. You may remember Paul Krugman – the Nobel prize winning progressive economist who decries the inequities of a capitalist society and whom recently accepted a six figure position with an institution of higher progressive learning for offering his valued opinion on matters of import, yet not required to lower himself to the masses and actually teaching in the classroom. This latest Krugman article perpetuates the infrastructure redundancy that progressives seemingly fall back on every time they need an economic issue to distract voters with. You may remember the Obama proclamation of 2008 wherein the great orator decreed:

“We will create millions of jobs by making the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s. We’ll invest your precious tax dollars in new and smarter ways, and we’ll set a simple rule &ndash; use it or lose it. If a state doesn’t act quickly to invest in roads and bridges in their communities, they’ll lose the money.”

Subsequently, in March of 2009, the single greatest stimulus package was passed and funds were given to the administration to use where they sought fit. Strangely, the infrastructure still seems to be a problem, and an issue of which progressive elites like Krugman feel that they can foam up the base with one more time:

“In prosperous times, public spending on roads, bridges and so on competes with the private sector for resources. Since 2008, however, our economy has been awash in unemployed workers (especially construction workers) and capital with no place to go (which is why government borrowing costs are at historic lows). Putting those idle resources to work building useful stuff should have been a no-brainer.”

Now, did Krugman forget his Messiah’s 2008 proclamation and subsequent spending spree, or is he being purposely deceitful? I will leave that to your own imagination, but you can all easily imagine is what Krugman’s answer is to this on-going infrastructure problem – more taxes of course:

“It’s hard to think of any good reason why taxes on gasoline should be so low, and it’s easy to think of reasons, ranging from climate concerns to reducing dependence on the Middle East, why gas should cost more. So there’s a very strong case for raising the gas tax “

The progressive Democrats have yet to find a problem, real or contrived, that can’t be resolved by raising taxes. The problem for them is that these issuess are never resolved despite how many taxes they raise, and fortunately for those of us in “realville”, the majority of voters are starting to come to that realization. One thing is for certain though, you can expect this issue, , and the other redundant issues of climate change, and the patently absurd “war on women” to be part and parcel to the Democrats 2014 and 2016 agenda.

I know I’ve said this before, but it’s an important phrase to ponder. “FUNDAMENTALLY” TRANSFORM THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.” Think about that. Let that short, simple, yet all-encompassing phrase sink in. First focus on the word “TRANSFORM” and then the root word of “FUNDAMENTALLY.”

To “transform” something, by definition, is to make something evolve into something radically different from what it has traditionally been. “Fundamental” by definition is a defining, basic characteristic. A building block–something foundational to its being.

Now, to “FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORM” means to radically transform the United States from what it has traditionally been– the “shining city on a hill”- the land of opportunity–based on the premise of individual liberty and the affordance of self-determination–yes–to transform that– into something *fundamentally different* and thus diametrically opposed to that foundation.

The Third World Despots, the Kruschevs, the Fidel Castros, the Kim Jong Ils and Uns of the world, have given hours-long speeches about their hopes for the destruction of the Free World, but never have they been able to put it so succinctly and eloquently as has Obama in that one simple, yet profound phrase. “..We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Many people chalked that phrase to meaningless boilerplate rhetoric, as so much rhetorical fluff. But of all the promises Obama made that were broken, whether it was closing Guantanamo Bay, allowing people to ‘keep their doctors or their health plans–period,” or to decrease health insurance costs by $2500 per year, this– this seminal promise–(along with bankrupting the coal industry)–was the one he meant from the bottom of his joyless, cavernous heart.

No people. The Presidency of Barack Hussein Obama is not ended. He still has a lot of ‘fundamental transformations’ to perform.

Barack Obama’s “scorched earth” policy against America and its people has only just begun.